Here Comes a New Breed of Display

A new camera from Kodak brings much-heralded OLED display technology out of the lab and into a shipping camera.

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In what may be a milestone for the display industry, Kodak is shipping a new digital camera that has the distinction of being the first commercially available camera with an OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display. The 3.1-megapixel Kodak LS633, which lists for $399, is shipping initially in Europe and not the United States.

OLED displays, invented by Kodak, use phosphorescent organic, light-emitting elements instead of the standard liquid crystals. The science behind such displays is among the more closely watched emerging technologies today. Development of prototype OLED displays has heated up, causing some observers to say that the technology could revolutionize the display industry by leading to flexible, inexpensive displays that can be slapped onto a sheet of plastic, laminated onto a car windshield, or even put on the sleeve of a soldier's uniform. Universal Display Corporation (UDC), for example, has working prototypes for OLED displays that can pull out of a pen in the same manner as a roll-up window shade.

According to Rowan Lawson, director of worldwide product marketing for digital imaging at Kodak, OLED displays will make it to the US, but not right away. "It's a new technology," he says. "The reason we put the OLED display on [the LS633] is that we felt the brightness and quality of the display we'd come up with was ideal for the kind of immediate picture sharing consumers do. The first thing you do when you take a picture with a digital camera is you show the person standing next to you how the picture you just took looks. The OLED display looked great for that."

Dan Gisser, director of strategic marketing for display products at Kodak, says that because the company doesn't think of OLEDs as future technology, it has been able to ship a device using the displays while other makers have only prototypes. "We absolutely believe that this is a technology for now," he says. "We're doing [OLED displays], and they're going to show up in our cameras. I think you'll find with the other players in OLEDs, they simply don't have the technology to make good screens yet. We have a lead in this, and we have brought it to manufacturing." Gisser also confirms that Kodak has plans to do OLED displays for products other than cameras.

So how does an OLED display work? "Basically what you have is a piece of glass with thin-film silicon transistors on it," says Gisser. "That much of the display is the same as an LCD. On top of that, though, you have a stack of four or five extremely thin layers of organic materials. They're laid out in precisely controlled layers. When you put a voltage across that stack, the organic materials glow. They literally produce light. There are approximately 10 organic materials in the layers, and they are organic from a chemist's point-of-viewcarbon-based molecules that conduct electrons very well, along with dyes. They can be thought of as organic semiconductors.

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"The organic materials within the display are producing light themselves, so a few things come from that. One is that they produce light uniformly in all directions. That means that the quality from any viewing angle is high. The other key thing is that when the pixels are off, they're actually off, so you get a truly dark background which leads to good contrast."

According to Gisser and Lawson, there is a big opportunity to do OLED displays for many kinds of products. Says Gisser, "What's nice about OLEDs is we can take the driving idea behind LCDsthe silicon transistorsand basically reconfigure them. Instead of doing the liquid crystal material and polarizers, we put on a thin stack of organic materials, which glows and emits light internally. There's a $20 or $30 billion industry built around doing LCDs for notebook computers and the like."

For a glimpse at how OLEDs and other future technologies might revolutionize notebook computing, see the recent ExtremeTech story written by Howard Locker, senior architect of IBM's personal systems group, who foresees flexible OLEDs that will be viewable in sunlight coming to notebook computers in the near future.

Sebastian Rupley is Editorial Director for PCMagCast, PC Magazine's channel for live Web seminars and online events on tech topics for consumers and small businesses. Previously, he was West Coast Editor of PC Magazine for over a decade, where he oversaw news and feature stories for the publication, and represented the brand on panels and at conferences on the West Coast. He also served as Features Editor of PC/Computing magazine, managing and promoting many noted technology journalists.
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